Service As a Small Fish
Volunteering for some people can often leave themselves feeling shallow, ineffective, and downcast about their service efforts. A common misnomer when it comes to serving is that it will always make you warm and bubbly on the inside knowing you’ve made the world a better place. Sometimes, you are just a very small cog in a very large machine, and you can struggle to make a difference. This is especially the case with 826LA. You can show up and give 105% for the whole workshop, and yet not really accomplish anything, because at the end of the day you are a small fish in a big pond when it comes to fixing the public education system in Los Angeles County. To really be effective when working with 826LA, you still need to attend writing workshops and in school events, but you also need to be willing to put in a shift outside of the classroom and outside of the school. This combination of service types is the only way for someone to be effective as a singular college kid dealing with a system as large as public education in L.A.
The types of service described in the first paragraph are explained really well by Keith Morton. Morton outlines that there are three different types of service in the world; charity, project, and social change. Charity is the short term fix of donating money or donating your time in a one off situation to do something like clean a beach. In the case of 826LA, charity is donating your time once every few weeks to help with writing workshops or college applications. Morton says that charity should only be used in events of large scale disasters or catastrophes where help is needed immediately because in the long term, charity is not the most effective form of service. Morton also outlines the second, more abstract type of service called project service. Project service at its core identifies a problem, finds a solution, and then makes a group or organization to link the two and provide that solution. The third and final type of service is social change. Social change is the largest scale of the three types of service. Social change aims to fix the root cause of the problem, for example with 826LA, the social change required would be some sort of reform within the Los Angeles Unified School District to fix some of the issues on a wide scale and to fix education inequality. To be effective in serving with 826LA, my fellow volunteers and I need to apply a mix of those different types of service in order to see the work really pay off.
The first part of the mix I need to focus on is charity. Showing up to Manual Arts High School writing workshops is a great way to get involved and a great place to start. During these workshops, my role is to help students with whatever writing assignment or task they are working on, and sometimes it involves just listening to students and helping them get what is in their head onto paper. You can really see first-hand how this affects students. One of the more prominent forms of charity 826LA does is they help with college applications and college essays. They walk students through the personal essays on the University of California applications, and help take examples from the students life and put them into the application. In this way, 826LA has helped many students gain acceptance into college, and at Manual Arts High School is oftentimes a very big deal as they may be first generation college students. By helping these kids with their college essays and other writing tasks, I can be instrumental in forging a new path for kids. However, even if one kid gets into college that you helped write their essay, there are fifty other kids across Los Angeles that don’t receive that same help because there aren’t enough 826’s in the world to help, and that is actually the job of the Los Angeles Unified School District as much as you may doubt it. That is where the next concept of service I need to practice to be effective is, and that is called social change, because while charity helps for some individuals, social change is needed to fix the underlying problems.
It may seem daunting to someone when they think they need to try and spearhead social change all by their lonesome, but in reality you can effect social change all by yourself by doing some small tasks. In this case, I don’t need to revolutionize the L.A.U.S.D. I do not need to run for school board and write up a new budget that could more efficiently allocate the massive $18 billion budget, or create a new program that would help English learners more seamlessly transition to learning a new language. In short, people just need to be willing to go to bat for public school kids in L.A when it really matters. It may be something as simple as filling in a bubble. Hypothetically say that there is a new levy is on the ballot that would increase taxes by $17 on L.A residents a year but in exchange hire 65 new college counselors that would be employed in the 65 schools with the lowest number of kids going to college. Instead of voting no thinking that you could use that $17 to buy yourself a nice lunch, you just need to vote yes and understand the larger impact your $17 could have. While voting sounds like an easy way for me to bring about social change, for me it brings up a challenge and an important question. I am not from Los Angeles or California, and can’t vote on any sort of ballot initiatives. This brings up the question of “How can I help bring social change to a community that I am not a part of?”.
The question is challenging. I am not from L.A, and have only lived there for around 7 months now, so how could I possibly help to create social change? I think that I need need to be more involved and make an effort to not only relate to my new community, but to be able to work for it. One example may be that when a new issue goes in front of the school board, go to a meeting and speak out on it. Speak out knowing that it will directly affect the kids who I have been helping write. At the end of the day, it is the large reform that will have the largest impact on kids in the L.A.U.S.D, and that should be a focus of my volunteer work.
Being effective as a volunteer for 826L.A is going to take a lot more than just showing up once every two weeks and helping with writing. I need to also be willing to work for social change, and not just limit myself to charity.
